I will talk about this on the next episode - but long of the short - I talked with 3 different people within the FCC that work on Qualification of cell phones and other devices. I asked them if a manufacturer would actually need a new FCC qual if they were going from an Edge phone to a 3G phone. Well we have a split decision - 2 felt that as long as they did not change their baseband frequencies - No they would not. The third person - who the first two pointed me to as being the better source - said that it would depend on the difference in the phone. He felt that a simple software update would not need a new qual - but if there were new hardware on the transmission side - even at the same baseband freq's - then yes it would need some sort of qual.

What does this mean? Well - That most likely Apple will need to get approval from the FCC before introducing the 3G iPhone. So we should get some warning prior to the official release of the 3G iPhone but then again maybe not.

Also let me say the People I talked to were very nice and very helpful.